Bob Jones Sr.
Bob Jones Sr. | |
---|---|
Born | Robert Davis Reynolds Jones October 30, 1883 |
Died | January 16, 1968 | (aged 84)
Resting place | Bob Jones University |
Nationality | American |
Occupation(s) | Evangelist University administrator |
Spouses | Bernice Sheffield
(m. 1905; died 1906)
|
Children | Bob Jones Jr. |
Parent(s) | William Alexander Jones Georgia Ann Creel Jones |
Relatives | Bob Jones III (grandson) |
1st President of Bob Jones University | |
In office 1927–1947 | |
Succeeded by | Bob Jones Jr. |
Robert Reynolds Jones Sr. (October 30, 1883 – January 16, 1968) was an American evangelist, pioneer religious broadcaster, and the founder and first president of Bob Jones University.
Early years
Bob Davis Reynolds Jones[1] was the eleventh of twelve children born to William Alexander and Georgia Creel Jones. In 1883, when Bob was born, Alex Jones, a Confederate veteran, was working a small farm in Dale County, Alabama, but within months the family moved to Brannon Stand west of Dothan. All the unmarried Jones children helped work the farm there, and Bob Jones often sold the family vegetables door-to-door in Dothan. Jones later recalled, "We may have been a little undernourished, but we built some character."[2]
Jones's elementary schooling was limited by modern standards, but the boy early exhibited a quick mind and oratorical ability. Alex Jones had Bob memorize passages from the Bible and from literature, and Bob, who was "timid and self-conscious," was regularly called on to perform for guests. Jones later recalled, "I did whatever my father said to do, but when he told me to 'say the speech,' I suffered agony that nobody could possibly know."[3]
Jones must have quickly overcome his stage fright, however, for by 1895, as a twelve-year-old, he gave a spirited, twenty-minute defense of the
By the time Jones was 17, both his father and mother were dead. In 1905, Jones married Bernice Sheffield, who contracted tuberculosis and died within ten months of their marriage. On June 17, 1908, he married Mary Gaston Stollenwerck, whom he had met as a choir member during a meeting he was conducting in Uniontown, Alabama. Their only child, Bob Jones Jr., was born October 19, 1911, in Montgomery, where they made their home. Mary Gaston Jones died on May 12, 1989, in her 101st year—83 years after the death of her husband's first wife.
Evangelistic career
At age 12, Jones was made Sunday School superintendent, and he held his first revival meeting at his home church—seeing sixty conversions in a single week. At thirteen, he built a "brush arbor" shelter and organized his own congregation of 54 members. By age 15, Jones was a licensed circuit preacher for the Alabama
American evangelistic meetings received more newspaper publicity at the turn of the twentieth century than before or since and were often boosted by the town fathers out of civic pride. Bob Jones meetings were frequently front-page news for weeks in the cities where he held meetings. By the 1920s, Jones was probably the best-known evangelist in the United States except for
By the time he was 40, Jones had preached to more than fifteen million people face-to-face and without amplification, and he was credited with tens of thousands of conversions. (Unlike Billy Sunday, Jones was reluctant to keep tabulated records of his results.) Crowds might be as large as 15,000 at a time, virtually necessitating the sustained volume, hyperbolic language, and extravagant gestures that became stereotypical characteristics of period evangelists. (In Zanesville, a reporter noted that Jones "pounded the altar so hard he broke it.")[7]
Bob Jones University
During the
In the fall of 1925—shortly after the
On April 14, 1926, a charter was approved by the circuit court in Panama City, Florida, and Jones promoted real estate sales to raise money for the college. On December 1, 1926, ground was broken on St. Andrews Bay near Lynn Haven, Florida, and the college opened on September 12, 1927, with 88 students. Jones said that although he was averse to naming the school after himself his friends overcame his reluctance "with the argument that the school would be called by that name because of my connection with it, and to attempt to give it any other name would confuse the people."[10]
Bob Jones took no salary from the college, and in fact, for years afterward, he helped support the school through personal savings and income from his evangelistic campaigns. Both time and place were inauspicious. The
By that time, oversight of day-to-day operations had long since passed to his son, Bob Jones Jr. Nevertheless, the elder Jones continued to raise money, preach regularly at chapel services, and provide inspiration to the hundreds of ministerial students who flooded the campus during the 1950s and revered him as "Doctor Bob." Gradually, during the early '60s, he began to suffer "hardening of the arteries," resigned as chairman of the board in 1964, and was forced to retire to the University infirmary in 1966. Despite mental confusion, his prayers were said to have remained bell-clear virtually to the end.[12]
Radio broadcasts
New mass entertainment, such as radio and movies, helped put an end to an era of citywide evangelism typified by the ministries of Bob Jones and Billy Sunday. But Jones was not afraid of technological progress per se and believed that the new media might provide additional opportunities to spread the gospel. During the early 1920s Jones was one of the first religious figures to broadcast on radio. The 1925 Bob Jones evangelistic meetings in Pittsburgh were perhaps the first remote-controlled religious broadcasts in the world, as well as the first broadcasts to originate from an evangelistic crusade. (In the same year, Jones also made a religious film, which because of its graphic—for the era—portrayal of certain sins, was slashed into an "unrecognizable mess" by the Pennsylvania State Censorship Board.)
In 1927, the year that network radio was launched in the United States, Jones began both a daily and weekly network program heard from New York to Alabama; and despite his other responsibilities, he maintained an uninterrupted radio ministry for 35 years until his health failed in 1962. In 1944, Jones became a founder of National Religious Broadcasters and served as a director.
Jones understood that the manner of delivery necessary to declaim to thousands unamplified was unsuited to the new medium, and his radio sermons were instead delivered in an intimate, folksy manner. Perhaps three thousand of his approximately ten thousand radio messages survive, and recordings are still nationally syndicated.[13]
Religious views
Theologically, Jones was a
Perhaps because of the tension between his mother’s
Jones's view of academic learning was also practical; he advocated Christian higher education yet insisted that faith could not rest on human argument. Jones was skeptical of both the intellectual emphasis of the Reformed tradition and the
In the 1950s, Jones played an important, if unwelcome, role in the division of orthodox Protestantism into
Political and social views
Jones enjoyed politics, was the friend of many politicians, and had been encouraged to run for office a number of times. During the 1928 presidential election, Jones campaigned throughout the South for Republican Herbert Hoover against Democrat Al Smith. Smith, he claimed, would be unduly influenced by the Pope, who Jones said was to Catholics "the voice of God."[18] Jones said he "would rather see a saloon on every corner than a Catholic in the White House."[19] Jones's support for Hoover, though quixotic in 1928, was perhaps the earliest harbinger of the demise of the Solid South.
In the late 1920s, Jones, like Billy Sunday (who was an Iowan), accepted contributions for his evangelistic campaigns from the Ku Klux Klan. Jones also supported members of the Klan, notably his friend, Alabama Governor Bibb Graves, for political office. Although Jones rejected lawlessness and lynching, he sympathized with the Klan's professed endorsement of religious orthodoxy, Prohibition, and opposition to the teaching of evolution as fact. Racial segregation per se was hardly an issue among whites in 1920s Alabama because at the time both supporters and a majority of white opponents of the Klan were segregationists.[20]
Nevertheless, Jones remained a segregationist into the era of the
Writings
- Bob Jones' Sermons
- On Here and Hereafter
- "My Friends" (radio messages based on Jones's chapel sayings)
- Things I Have Learned: Chapel Talks by Bob Jones Sr. (1945)
- Is Segregation Scriptural? (1960)[22]
References
- ^ The story that Jones was also named "Davis" for Confederate president Jefferson Davis is presented at length in Johnson, 7-10, and is repeated in Kurt W. Peterson, “Jones, Bob,” American National Biography, 12: 180-82. It is more likely that Jones was named for a former neighbor, the blind doctor who delivered him, Robert Davis Reynolds. In any case, the "Davis" was never used on any official document. On Robert Davis Reynolds, see Henry Schuman, “A Dream Come True: The Lawrence Reynolds Collection,” Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 47 (July 1959), 238.
- ^ Turner, Standing Without Apology, 3
- ^ Turner, 6
- ^ Turner, 6-8; Mallalieu Seminary catalog, 1897-98.
- ^ Turner, 5-6
- ^ Johnson, 128
- ^ Quoted in Johnson, 95. "The custodian replaced the broken top with a thicker board and a pad."
- ^ Turner, 19
- ^ Johnson and Wright give no date for this event. Turner (23) says it occurred in “early April 1925,” but as late as August 29, 1925, Jones told an Alabama audience, “I can’t figure out why any man in Covington County would want to sell out and go to Florida. This is the greatest country I know of.” Andalusia (AL) Daily Star, August 29, 1925, 1. Less than two months later he announced to a crowd in the Methodist church of Panama City, Florida, that he planned to establish an interdenominational college there in Bay County. Panama City Pilot, October 22, 1925, 8.
- ^ Turner, 23-25. In the earliest years of the college, important contributions were made to its stability by J. Floyd Collins and Eunice Hutto. Johnson, 180, 198.
- ^ On the move to Greenville see, John A. Matzko, "'This Is It, Isn't It, Brother Stone?' The Move of Bob Jones University from Cleveland, Tennessee, to Greenville, 1946-47," South Carolina Historical Magazine, 108 (July 2007), 235-256.
- ^ Turner, 210-11, 320
- ^ BJU website Archived January 17, 2006, at the Wayback Machine; Turner, 12, 59
- ^ "I believe in the inspiration of the Bible (both the Old and the New Testaments); the creation of man by the direct act of God; the incarnation and virgin birth of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ; His identification as the Son of God; His vicarious atonement for the sins of mankind by the shedding of His blood on the cross; the resurrection of His body from the tomb; His power to save men from sin; the new birth through the regeneration by the Holy Spirit; and the gift of eternal life by the grace of God."
- ^ Comments on Here and Hereafter, 61, 91; Johnson, 77-84
- ^ Comments, 54, 123
- ^ Turner, 179-83
- ^ Bob Jones, The Perils of America (1934), a sermon published as a red, paper-bound booklet.
- ISBN 978-0743277020.
- ^ Johnson, 138; Turner, 12. Jones defended Klan positions in the 1920s, but there is no evidence that he ever became a member: “’I am not a member of the Ku Klux Klan,’ Mr. Jones said, ‘Col. William J. Simmons, imperial wizard of the klan, a former Methodist preacher, is a close personal friend of mine and he approached me to join the klan. He told me it was a patriotic organization and that it had never been a party to lawlessness. I did not join.’” El Paso Times, September 30, 1922, 2.
- ^ Turner, 225, 369
- ^ Is Segregation Scriptural?. CrossReach Publications. 16 January 2017. Retrieved 10 March 2020 – via Amazon.
Sources
- R. K. Johnson, Builder of Bridges: The Biography of Dr Bob Jones Sr (Sword of the Lord Publishers, 1969).
- Daniel L. Turner, Standing Without Apology: The History of Bob Jones University (Bob Jones University Press, 1997)]
- Melton Wright, Fortress of Faith: The Story of Bob Jones University (Bob Jones University Press, 1984)